OpenStack: Three Years Old and Growing Fast

Open Cloud Academy pilot students and curious attendees of the opening ceremony mingle and explore the classrooms on the 6th floor of the Weston Centre. The "bones" of the original Rackspace data center still linger and serve as a learning tool for the school. Photos by Iris Dimmick.

Updated February 20, 2014

OpenStack, an open source cloud computing network and software, is no longer a toddler. Last Friday, it turned three years old. And like all preschoolers, it’s making amazing strides and having an occasional fall. But it is absolutely something that all of us who helped birth are amazingly proud of! It has grown into a project the scope of which is beyond anything we saw coming three years go.

It’s been a another huge year for milestones – more contributors, more members, more projects, more code; you name it. It remains the fastest growing global open source community – with 231 companies, more than 10,000 individual members, more than 1,000 total contributors and more than 200 average monthly contributors. The OpenStack community now includes 121 countries and has seen upwards of 70,000 code contributions.

But the big thing over the past year was the rapid growth in our user community. If OpenStack Summit Portland was any indication, this was truly the year of the user for OpenStack. Customers like HubSpot, Sony, Comcast and more took to the stage to share their OpenStack stories. And just recently, CERN openlab shared its plans to leverage OpenStack for its research. Many more are deploying out of the spotlight, and many more are coming.

As we enter our fourth year, there are some key areas where our community can work together to make OpenStack even better and get even more people involved.

This portion of Curry’s story has been republished with permission. Read the full story at Rackspace’s blog: www.rackspace.com/blog

Jim Curry is the Senior Vice President and General Manager of Rackspace’s Private Cloud business, which supports and operates OpenStack-based private clouds in any data center worldwide. He joined Rackspace in 2006 to run corporate development efforts, which included new business incubation, venture investing activities, and mergers and acquisitions, including the acquisitions of Webmail.us, Slicehost, Jungle Disk and Cloudkick. Three years later, Jim led the founding of the OpenStack project on behalf of Rackspace and was responsible for developing the community until its transition to the OpenStack Foundation in 2012. He currently serves on the board of the foundation.

Jim has previously held executive positions with several technology startups, including Bowstreet and Tivoli, which have since been acquired by IBM. He holds a bachelor’s degree from the University of Texas and an MBA from Harvard University. Jim and his wife Laurie have a four-year-old son and one-year-old twins, a boy and a girl.